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Specification for Particulates Feed, recycle, and product from size reduction operations are defined in terms of the sizes involved. It is also important to have an understanding of the degree of aggregation or agglomeration that exists in the measured distribution. The fullest description of a powder is given by its particle-size distribution. This can be presented in tabular or graphical form. The simplest presentation is in linear form with equal size intervals (Table 20-1). The significance of the distribution is more easily grasped when the data are presented pictorially, the simplest form of which is the histogram. More usually the plot is of cumulative percentage oversize or undersize against particle diameters, or percentage frequency against particle diameters. It is common to use a weight basis for percentage but surface or number may, in some cases, be more relevant. The basis of percentage; weight, surface, or volume should be specified, together with the basis of diameter; sieve, Stokes, or otherwise. The measuring procedure should also be noted. Figure 20-1 presents the data from Table 20-1 in both cumulative and frequency format. In order to smooth out experimental errors it is best to generate the frequency curve from the slope of the cumulative

curve, to use wide-size intervals or a data-smoothing computer program. The advantage of this method of presenting frequency data is that the area under the frequency curve equals 100 percent, hence, it is easy to visually compare similar data. A typical title for such a presentation would be: Relative and cumulative mass distributions of quartz powder by pipet sedimentation. An alternative presentation of the same data is given in Fig. 20-2. In this case the sizes on the abscissa are in a logarithmic progression [log (x)] and the frequency is [dP/d ln (x)] so that the area under the frequency curve is, again, 100. This form of presentation is useful for wide-size distributions:

TYPES C. Heavy-duty impact mills: 1. Rotor breakers 2. Hammer mills 3. Cage impactors Hammer Crusher (Fig. 20-27): Heavy-duty hammer crushers are frequently used in the quarrying industry, for processing municipal solid waste, and scrap automobiles. Pivoted hammers are mounted on a horizontal shaft, and crushing takes place by impact between the hammers and breaker plates. These crushers are of two types (without and with screens or grates).

The Pennsylvania reversible impactor is open, and the sized material passes through almost instantaneously (Particles acquire high velocities, and this leads to little control on particle size and a much higher proportion of fines than slow-speed crushers). In the second type of mill (Fig. 20-28), a cylindrical grating is provided beneath the rotor for product discharge. Some hammer crushers are symmetrically designed so that the direction of rotation can be reversed to distribute wear evenly on the hammer and breaker plates. When such a Pennsylvania nonreversible hammer mill is used for reduction, material is broken first by impact against hammers and then by rubbing action (attrition) against screen bars.

Rotor Impactors The rotor of these machines is a cylinder to which is affixed a tough steel bar. Breakage can occur against this bar or on rebound from the walls of the device. Free impact breaking is the principle of the rotor breaker, and it does not rely on pinch crushing or attrition grinding between rotor hammers and breaker plates. The result is a high reduction ratio and elimination of secondary and tertiary crushing stages Cage Mills The Stedman disintegrator (Stedman Machine Co.), commonly referred to as a cage mill, is used for crushing quarry rock, phosphate rock, and fertilizer and for disintegrating clays, colors, press cake, and bones. Cages of one, two, three, four, six, and eight rows, with bars of special alloy steel, revolving in opposite directions, produce a powerful impact action that pulverizes many materials. (See Fig. 20-29.) The life of a cage may be a few months and may produce 9000 Mg (10,000 tons) of quarry rock. A gray-iron cage is used for alumina grinding, with metal particles removed magnetically. The advantage of multiple-row cages is the achievement of a greater reduction ratio in a single pass. These features and the low cost of the mills make them suitable for medium-scale operations where complicated circuits cannot be justified.

I. Medium peripheral-speed mills: rolling compression mills 1. Ring-roll and bowl mills 2. Roll mills, cereal type 3. Roll mills, paint and rubber types 4. Buhrstones STIRRED MEDIA MILLS Applications overlap with those of vibratory mills, described in the next group. Vibrational equipment is generally used for hard-grinding operations (ZrSiO4, SiO2, TiO2, Al2O3, etc.), while stirred grinders are

mainly used for dispersion and soft grinding (dyes, clays, CaCO3, biological cells, etc). Stirred mills are also called sand mills when Ottawa sand is used as media. Contamination and grinder-body wear may be minimized in both types by the use of resilient coatings. Stirred mills use media 6 mm (d in.) in size or smaller, whereas vibratory mills use larger media for the same power input. Vibratory mills may grind dry, but most stirred mills are restricted to wet milling. Solids vary from 25 to 70 percent, depending on the feed size and rheology. Unlike in rotary-ball mills, some sedimentation may occur. The media filling ranges from 60 to 90 percent of apparent filling of the mill volume. Design In stirred mills, a central paddle wheel or disced armature stirs the media at speeds from 100 to 1500 r/min. The media oscillate in one or more planes and commonly rotate very slowly. In the Attritor (Union Process Inc.) a single vertical armature rotates several long radial arms. These are available in batch, continuous, and circulation types. Morehouse-Cowles media mills comprise a vertical tubular chamber with coaxial rotating disks, and an integral variable-flow diaphragm pump. Models are available from 5 to 100 hp for aqueous and solvent slurries. The Netzsch LME4 mill can be operated with a feed rate up to 100 L/hr [Kula and Schuette, Biotechnology Progress, 3(1), 3142 (1987)].

Figure 20-35 illustrates the Drais continuous stirred-media mill. The media are stirred by discs mounted on a central shaft. The advantage of horizontal machines is the elimination of gravity segregation of the feed. The feed slurry is pumped in at one end and discharged at the other, where the media are retained by a screen or array of closely spaced flat discs. The latter is useful with slurries having viscosity up to 50 Pas (50,000 cP), while screens are useful up to 1 Pas. Hydrodynamically shaped screen cartridges can accommodate media as fine as 0.2 mm. German manufacturers [Stadler et al., Chemie-IngenieurTechnik, 62(11), 907915 (1990)] have produced mills of various shapes, primarily to aid separation of beads from product. When the mill body rotates with the screen at the axis, centrifugal force aids this separation. Agitator discs are available is several forms: smooth, perforated, eccentric, and pinned. Effect of disc design has received limited study, but pinned discs are usually reserved for highly viscous materials. Cooling water is circulated through a jacket and sometimes through the central shaft. The working speed of disc tips ranges from 5 to 15 m/sec, regardless of mill size. The continuously stirred mill can be fed by screw feeders from several material bins simultaneously, thus blending uniform compositions,

without incurring problems of transporting imperfectly blended or agglomerated mixtures. A series of mills may be used with decreasing media size and increasing rotary speed to achieve desired fineparticle size. No additional feed pumps are needed. The annular gap mill shown in Fig. 20-36 is a variation of the bead mill. It has a high-energy input as shown in Fig. 20-37. It may be lined with polyurethane and operated in multipass mode to narrow the residencetime distribution and to aid cooling. Performance of Bead Mills Materials processed in stirredmedia mills are listed in Table 20-17. Variables affecting the milling process are listed below. Stirred bead-mill process variables: Agitator speed Feed rate Size of beads Bead charge, percent of mill volume Cell concentration in feed Density of beads Temperature Design of blades Shape of mill chamber

Residence time The availability of more powerful, continuous machines has extended the possible applications to both lower- and higher-size ranges, from 5 to 200 m product size, and to feed size as large as 5 mm. The energy density may be 50 times larger than in tumbling-ball mills, so that a smaller mill is required (see Fig. 20-37). Mills range in size from 1 to 1000 L, with installed power up to 320 kW. Specific

Media mills: revolving mills 1. Ball, pebble, rod, and compartment mills: a. Batch b. Continuous 2. Autogenous tumbling mills 3. Stirred ball and bead mills 4. Vibratory mills

TUMBLING MILLS/ revolving mills Ball, pebble, rod, tube, and compartment mills have a cylindrical or conical shell, rotating on a horizontal axis, and are charged with a grinding medium such as balls of steel, flint, or porcelain or with steel rods. The ball mill differs from the tube mill by being short in length; its length, as a rule, is not far from its diameter (Fig. 20-31). Feed to ball mills can be as large as 2.5 to 4 cm (1

to 1a in) for very fragile materials, although the top size is generally 1 cm (a in). Most ball mills operate with a reduction ratio of 20 to 200:1. The largest balls are typically 13 cm (5 in) in diameter. The tube mill is generally long in comparison with its diameter, uses smaller balls, and produces a finer product. The compartment mill consists of a cylinder divided into two or more sections by perforated partitions; preliminary grinding takes place at one end and finish grinding at the discharge end. These mills have a length-to-diameter ratio in excess of 2 and operate with a reduction ratio of up to 600:1. Rod mills deliver a more uniform granular product than other revolving mills while minimizing the percentage of fines, which are sometimes detrimental. The pebble mill is a tube mill with flint or ceramic pebbles as the grinding medium and may be lined with ceramic or other nonmetallic liners. The rock-pebble mill is an autogenous mill in which the medium consists of larger lumps scalped from a preceding step in the grinding flow sheet. Design The conventional type of batch mill consists of a cylindrical steel shell with flat steelflanged heads. Mill length is equal to or less than the diameter [Coghill, De Vaney, and OMeara, Trans. Am. Inst. Min. Metall. Pet. Eng., 112, 79 (1934)]. The discharge opening is often opposite the loading manhole and for wet grinding usually is fitted with a valve. One or more vents are provided to release any pressure developed in the mill, to introduce inert gas, or to supply pressure to assist discharge of the mill. In dry grinding, the material is discharged into a hood through a grate over the manhole while the mill rotates. Jackets can be provided for heating and cooling. Material is fed and discharged through hollow trunnions at opposite ends of continuous mills (Fig. 20-31). A grate or diaphragm just inside the discharge end may be employed to regulate the slurry level in wet grinding and thus control retention time. In the case of air-swept mills, provision is made for blowing air in at one end and removing the ground material in air suspension at the same or other end. Tumbling-Mill Circuits Tumbling mills may be operated in normal closed circuit, as shown in Fig. 20-45 or 20-59, or in reverse arrangement in which the feed passes through the classifier before entering the mill (see secondary mill in Fig. 20-44 or 20-59). Multicompartmented mills feature grinding of coarse feed to finished product in a single operation, wet or dry. The primary grinding compartment carries large grinding balls or rods; one or more secondary compartments carry smaller media for finer grinding. VIBRATORY MILLS

The dominant form of industrial vibratory mill is the type with two horizontal tubes, called the horizontal tube mill. These tubes are mounted on springs and given a circular vibration by rotation of a counterweight, shown in Fig. 20-39. Many feed flow arrangements are possible, adapting to various applications. Variations include polymer lining to prevent iron contamination, blending of several components, milling under inert gas and at high and low temperatures. An example is the Palla vibratory mill (ABB Raymond Div, Combustion Engineering Inc.). The Vibro-Energy (Sweco, Inc.), a vertical vibratory mill (Fig. 20-40) has a mill body in a ring-shaped trough form but uses horizontal vibrations at a frequency of about 20 Hz of the contained media, usually alumina spheres or cylinders. Other characteristics appear in Table 20-19. The primary applications of vibratory mills are in fine milling of medium to hard minerals primarily in dry form, producing particle sizes of 1 m and finer.

SYSTEMS By closed-circuit operation the product size distribution is narrower and will have a larger proportion of particles of the desired size. On the other hand, making a product size within narrow limits (such as between 20 and 40 m) is often requested but usually is not possible regardless of the grinding circuit used. APPLICATIONS Practically every solid material undergoes size reduction at some point in its processing cycle. Some of the reasons for size reduction are: (1) to liberate a desired component for subsequent separation, as in separating ores from gangue; (2) to prepare the material for subsequent chemical reaction, i.e., by enlarging the specific surface as in cement manufacture; (3) to subdivide the material so that it can be intimately blended with other components; (4) to meet a size requirement for the quality of the end product, as in fillers or pigments for paints, plastics, agricultural chemicals etc.; (5) to prepare wastes for recycling. Systems Involving Size Reduction Industrial applications usually involve a number of processing steps combined with size reduction [Hixon, Chemical Engineering Progress, 87, 3644 (May 1991)]. The most common of these is size classification. Often only a particular range of product sizes is wanted for a given application. Since the particle breakage process always yields a spectrum of sizes, the product size can not be directly controlled; however, mill operation can sometimes be varied to produce less fines at the expense of producing more coarse particles. By recycling the classified coarse fraction and regrinding it, production of the wanted size range is optimized. Such an arrangement of classifier and mill is called a mill circuit, and is dealt with further below. More complex systems may include several unit operations such as mixing (Sec. 18), drying (Sec. 12), and agglomerating (see Size Enlargement, this section). Inlet and outlet silencers are helpful to reduce noise from high-speed mills. Chillers, air coolers, and explosion proofing may be added to meet requirements. Weighing and packaging facilities complete the system. Liberation Most ores are heterogeneous, and the objective of grinding is to release the valuable mineral component so that it can be separated.

The drying of materials while they are being pulverized or disintegrated is known variously as flash or dispersion drying; a generic term is pneumatic conveying drying. Data for the grinding and drying of bauxite in a ring-roller mill are given in Table 20-5. A drying system is shown under Clays and Kaolins, Fig. 20-58. Beneficiation Ball and pebble mills, batch or continuous, offer considerable opportunity for combining a number of processing steps that include grinding [Underwood, Ind. Eng. Chem., 30, 905 (1938)]. Mills followed by air classifiers can serve to separate components of mixtures because of differences in specific gravity and particle size. The removal of impurities by this means is known as cleaning, concentrating, or beneficiating. Screens are used to separate coarse particles, not easily pulverized, from fine particles of the component that are pulverized readily. Grinding followed by froth flotation has become the beneficiation method most widely used for metallic ores and also for nonmetallic minerals such as feldspar

Energy Energy Laws Several laws have been proposed to relate size reduction to a single variable, the energy input to the mill. These laws are encompassed in a general differential equation where E is the work done, X is the particle size, and C and n are constants. dE = C dX/Xn